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Louise Glück has been the recipient of virtually every major poetry award and was named U.S. poet laureate for 2003-2004. Daniel Morris treats Glück's persistent themes-desire, hunger, trauma, survival-through a close reading of her major book-length sequences from the 1990s: Ararat, Meadowlands, and The Wild Iris. He reads her poetry against a narrative pattern that shifts from the tones of anger, despair, and resentment found in her early Firstborn to the resignation of Ararat-and proceeds in her latest volumes, including Vita Nova and Averno, toward an ambivalent embrace of embodied life.

Carefully reconstructed from letters, newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, books, and court records, Searching for Jim offers a new perspective on Sam Clemens's writings, especially regarding his use of race in the portrayal of individual characters, their attitudes, and worldviews. This fascinating volume will be valuable to anyone trying to measure the extent to which Clemens transcended the slave culture he lived in during his formative years and the struggles he later faced in dealing with race and guilt. It will forever alter the way we view Sam Clemens, Hannibal, and Mark Twain.

Indian Summer is the newest collection of personal essays by Sam Pickering. In typical Pickering fashion, he seeks to capture the gift of living. He brings to the page again his family, students, and a wealth of country characters who live in places that exist only in his imagination and who wander through the stories he tells. He describes how his life has been altered by his children leaving home for college, and he ponders the changes aging brings and the things that never change. The consummate teacher, he celebrates academic life and the pleasures of the classroom. Readers will roam familiar ground with Pickering as he explores the fields and small hills of eastern Connecticut and the bogs and woods on his farm in Nova Scotia.

One of the premier writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Rudolph Fisher wrote short stories depicting the multifaceted black urban experience that are still acclaimed today for their humor, grace, and objective view of Harlem life. This definitive collection of Fisher's short stories has now been expanded to include seven previously unpublished stories, two unpublished speeches, and the popular article \"The Caucasian Storms Harlem,\" describing the craze for black music and dance. McCluskey's introduction has been updated to place the additional works within the context of Fisher's career while situating his oeuvre within the broader context of American writing during the twenties. John McCluskey, Jr., is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington and author of Look What They Done to My Song, Mr. America's Last Season Blues, and Black Men Speaking.

The essays in this collection honor Professor Ellis Sandoz, Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Louisiana State University, and founding director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies, an institute located at Louisiana State University and devoted to research and publication in the fields of political philosophy, constitutional law, and Voegelin studies. The essays, each written especially for this volume, are grouped into the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and politics and range widely across these subjects, exploring writers as diverse as Xenophon, S?seki Natsume, Freud, and George Santayana and topics ranging from the leadership style of François Mitterrand and the Velvet Revolution to the nature of the Law and of the Political. Philosophy, Literature, and Politics is a fitting tribute to a man whose life's work has been formed by commitment to the philosophical enterprise and by a conviction in Eric Voegelin's contribution to that enterprise. The seventeen essays in this collection will be of particular interest to scholars of politics, comparative government, Japanese studies, political philosophy, and literary criticism.

This revised and expanded edition of Beidler and Barton's indispensable A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich builds on the sellout success of the first edition. Every serious reader of Erdrich's fiction will want access to this comprehensive new edition, which includes valuable new material on four of Erdrich's novels published since the last edition. Also included are easy-to-use genealogical charts for the various families; a map and geographical details about the settings for the novels; a detailed composite dictionary of characters, even minor ones; and a glossary of all of the Ojibwe words, phrases, and sentences that Erdrich uses in her panoply of novels.

In his enduring fiction and criticism, Walter Sullivan has invited readers to share the thoughts of a penetrating, contemporary intellect. Now he turns his pen on his own life to forge a stirring memoir that fondly recounts the life of the mind. From childhood in 1920s Nashville, where his father died three months after he was born, to the halls of Vanderbilt University, where he taught creative writing for more than fifty years, Sullivan recalls key episodes in his life-often pausing to ponder why some memories of seemingly trivial events persist while others, seemingly more important, have faded from view. Readers will discover a treasure trove of insights, as Sullivan's views of academic life are complemented by remembrances of important writers: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, Flannery O'Connor, and a host of others, blending the formal and familiar in a style befitting a lingering southernness. Laced with humor while maintaining a profound seriousness about what really matters in life, Nothing Gold Can Stay is a lively narrative of a life well lived that will charm any reader interested in American society during and after the Great Depression.

In Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog, award-winning author Louis D. Rubin, Jr., discusses writing and writers based on his own experience as a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher, skillfully incorporating more than seventy years of knowledge and experience into this comprehensive and highly readable work. Most of his essays deal with various problems and possibilities characterizing the American literary scene today: the literary uses of memory, writer's block, the nature of place in fiction, the teaching of writers and the presence of writers on campuses, the condition of poetry today, sports writing, authorial intent in fiction, how nonfiction bolsters fiction, the parlous state of literary publishing, and other matters of cultural importance. Among the authors whose works figure in the book are Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Thomas Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Flannery O'Connor, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Henry James, A. J. Liebling, Shelby Foote, William Wordsworth, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway.

Although generations of readers of the Little House books are familiar with Laura Ingalls Wilder's early life up through her first years of marriage to Almanzo Wilder, few know about her adult years.Going beyond previous studies, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder focuses upon Wilder's years in Missouri from 1894 to 1957.

According to Sykes, the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy provides occasions for divine revelation. He traces their work from its common roots in midcentury southern and Catholic intellectual life to show how the two adopted different theological emphases and rhetorical strategies-O'Connor building to climactic images, Percy striving for dialogue with the reader-as a means of uncovering the sacramental foundation of the created order. Through sustained readings of key texts, Sykes focuses on the intertwined themes of revelation, sacrament, and community. By disclosing how O'Connor and Percy made aesthetic choices based on their Catholicism and their belief that fiction by its very nature is revelatory, Sykes demonstrates that their work cannot be seen as merely a continuation of the historical aesthetic that dominated southern literature for so long.